Coffee making machines, in which hot water is supplied to infuse ground coffee, are widely used in food service establishments, such as offices, hotels and restaurants. In such coffee making machines a brew basket in which a pre-measured quantity of ground coffee is disposed, is slidably mounted on the bottom wall of an upper housing of the coffee maker directly below a spray head that discharges hot water from a heated tank within the device in a downwardly diverging conical pattern onto the ground coffee in the bottom of the brew basket. Typically, a pair of opposed guide brackets on the bottom wall of the upper housing of the coffee maker support the brew basket by means of a marginal rim around the upper edge of the basket so that the upper edge of the brew basket is centrally disposed under the spray head.
Usually, a conventional brew basket has a frusto-conical shape, having a height of about 7 to 12 cm or more with the bottom wall of the basket is being provided with an outlet for brewed coffee. Conventional brew baskets typically have several internal peripheral steps for supporting a filter paper cone on which the ground coffee to be infused is disposed. In the past, loose ground coffee has usually been used such coffee making machines, with the ground coffee either being transferred from a bulk container or from a pre-measured packet. Recently, in order to facilitate the use of such coffee makers and to reduce the inconvenience of handling and storing packages of loose ground coffee, tablets or wafers of compressed ground coffee have been developed, with such compressed wafers containing a pre-measured quantity of ground coffee. While convenient to use, such compressed coffee wafers have not been particularly well suited for use in conventional brew baskets of commercial coffee makers. Compressed coffee wafers, when placed in the bottom of a conventional brew basket, do not provide brewed coffee of equivalent strength to that obtained by use of the same amount of ground coffee in loose form. This has required persons who desire the convenience of use of compressed coffee wafers to accept coffee of less than a desired strength, or to use wafers containing additional amounts of ground coffee in an attempt to obtain brewed coffee of a desired strength.